Chapter 12 #2
He sighed. “My parents died. First my mother and then, a couple of years later, my father. After that, my brothers and I went to war. Every conversation became an argument. Every disagreement became a battle.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Some people seem to enjoy fighting. I never understood it.”
Elodie said nothing, digesting this. So something had happened between him and his brothers to drive him away.
This was more than he’d ever revealed before.
She thought of the fine swords hanging in the forge.
The well-bred horse. The polished manners that occasionally surfaced when he forgot himself.
The warrior she’d seen training alone behind the smithy.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
He looked at her. “For what?”
“For telling me.”
Something warm flickered in his expression. “So ye know a little of my story. What about yers?”
Elodie hesitated. She wanted to tell him the truth. She wanted it all to come tumbling out and be laid bare between them. It would be such a weight off her mind to finally reveal it all.
But she couldn’t. He wouldn’t believe her. Who would? Oh, I’m a time traveler, that’s all. Popped in for a visit from the twenty-first century. Nothing remarkable in that, is there?
He would think her insane or a liar.
“My story is much less interesting.”
“I doubt that.”
She kicked a stone from the path whilst she thought about what she could safely reveal. “I had a job.”
Ronan frowned. “A job?”
“Yep. And an apartment.”
“What is an apartment?”
She laughed. “I guess you’d call it a suite of rooms.”
“In a keep?”
“Not exactly.”
“A town house then?”
“Something like that.”
He looked unconvinced. “And this job? What is a job?”
She shrugged. “I suppose you would call it my craft.”
“Ye have a craft?” he said, surprised. “Ye are not a noblewoman then?”
She couldn’t help the laugh that burst out of her. “Me? Noble? Are you kidding? I grew up on a council estate!”
“But yer clothes. Yer jewelry—”
“Is just cheap tat, believe me. You can pick it up for next to nothing in the twenty-first...um...where I come from.”
He regarded her without speaking. There was an appraising look in his eyes as though he was filing this information away. “What sort of craft?”
“I was a project manager.”
The blank look he gave her made her laugh again.
“I organize people.”
Ronan snorted. “That explains a great deal.”
She smiled. “My life wasn’t dramatic. I worked too much. Saw too little of my family.”
A sudden twinge of homesickness went through her. What was going on right now at home? Was anyone missing her? Where they wondering where she was?
Ronan, she realized, was watching her intently.
“What?” she asked.
“Ye are unlike anyone I’ve ever met, ye know that?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said with a snort. And you would likely run a mile if you did.
She tried to change the subject. “So, when you found the Steading, did you find what you’d been looking for?”
He shrugged. “I dreamt of peace. Solitude. I got neither.”
Elodie nodded. “Reality very rarely lives up to the dream.”
“Ye sound like ye speak from experience, lass.”
“I do. Unfortunately.” Elodie snapped a dead twig off a branch and began shredding it. “I always thought I could make a difference. My whole life I’ve believed that if I fought hard enough, I could make things better. Now I realize I was just kidding myself.”
Ronan stopped walking and looked at her. “I think that’s the first stupid thing I’ve heard ye say.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ye really dinna see it, do ye? The effect ye have on people. The way the world shifts around ye. Ye are like a river in flood that uproots everything and drags it with her. Ye have made a difference, Elodie MacNeil. To the Steading. To the people who live here.” His gaze sharpened. “To me.”
Elodie blinked in surprise. She didn’t know what to say. Was that really how he saw her?
She suddenly wanted to feel the way she had for that brief instant when she’d been in his arms. So warm. So...alive. She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted it so badly she could almost taste it.
But Ronan stepped back, creating distance between them as though he had suddenly remembered all the reasons he shouldn’t be standing this close to her.
Elodie’s patience snapped. She reached out, grabbed the front of his shirt, and dragged him towards her. Going up on tiptoes, she pressed her lips against his.
For a second, he froze with shock. But only for a second. In the next instant, one of his arms was circling her waist, the other cupping the back of her neck as he deepened the kiss.
It wasn’t gentle. It was hot and insistent and full of all the things neither of them had been able to say. When they finally broke apart, they were breathing harder. Ronan rested his forehead against hers.
“What’s happening to us?” he asked quietly.
She had no answers. She should not be feeling this way about a seventeenth century Highlander. But she couldn’t help it. She felt like she was standing in front of an avalanche commanding it to halt whilst all the time knowing it would sweep her away no matter what she did.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“Then how about we find out together?”
She placed her palms flat against his chest, feeling the thump of his heart beneath her palms. “That sounds good to me.”
Slowly, reluctantly, he stepped back and they resumed walking.
And when Ronan’s hand took hold of hers, she didn’t pull away.